Tuesday, June 14, 2016

Lost in the funhouse

Take the worst examples of Donald Trump’s most recent embarrassing behavior. His Trump University, like many other such transient for-profit institutions, allegedly played fast and loose with the truth in search of lucre. And the media are certainly right to fixate on all those who may have been misled by and suffered from Trump’s selfish profiteering. But the media fail at their own standards of vetting presidential candidates about profiting off higher education when they have largely ignored the far bigger con of Hillary Clinton price-gouging cash-strapped public universities like UCLA for $300,000 for 30 minutes of chatting — a per-minute rate of profit no doubt greater than Trump’s personal returns. Even worse is the con of “Honorary Chancellor” Bill Clinton garnering a reported $16 million between 2010 and 2015 from the for-profit Laureate International Universities, whose U.S. campuses have been plagued by financial controversies. During that period, Bill Clinton was perhaps the highest-salaried university “president” or “chancellor” in the world (and likely in the history of higher education) — and perhaps the only disbarred college chancellor in America. But to the media, all that is a non-story.

And the people who aren’t in Hillary’s trick bag are supposed to care that Trump’s a jerk?

They don’t, by and large. Sure, Trump makes what we conservatives all agree is a distasteful comment insinuating that a federal judge’s rulings would be governed by an inherited characteristic, in this case his ethnicity. The mainstream media goes nuts at how horrible Trump is for assuming that an inherited characteristic might govern someone’s actions in public office. Then a day later, the media experiences a collective climax over the fact that a woman has been nominated, and they think it’s great because that inherited characteristic will govern her actions in public office.

When the “have you no decency?” crowd demonstrates an utter lack of decency every single day, its complaints lose their sting.

One of the reasons it's been difficult for me to blog lately is the sense we're so lost in the funhouse and we're in a constant state of gaslighting. I'm trying to sort all that out, but in the current environment it's taxing my feeble brain. We've always been at war with Eastasia, apparently.